Two days before the end of term, Hermione came down to breakfast with a list.
It was a short one for her. It had three things on it, and she put it down next to my porridge so I could read it.
1. Cup (Hufflepuff). 2. Diadem (Ravenclaw). 3. Dragon (Gringotts).
"I made it last night," she said. "We said we'd deal with all of these after the tournament, and we're running out of time."
"I don't think we can do much about the dragon," I said.
"Not yet," said Hermione. "But somebody ought to do something about it, so I've written to Charlie Weasley. He works with dragons. He'll know who to ask."
She tapped the second line. "I'm keeping this one until I leave school. Ravenclaw made it for wearing. I don't think she'd want it sitting in a cabinet."
"So you're borrowing it for another three years," I said.
"It isn't a joke, Harry. I really am going to give it back." She tapped the first line. "That just leaves the cup."
We took it to Dumbledore that evening, wrapped in the same cloth I'd carried it out of Gringotts in.
He unwrapped it on his desk and turned it slowly in the light from his window, so that the little badger on the side caught the evening sun.
"Helga Hufflepuff's cup," he said. "I wondered when I would see it again." He set it down. "What would you like done with it?"
Hermione looked at me. I'd thought about it already.
Its last owner had been Hepzibah Smith, and she'd been dead for nearly fifty years, poisoned by her own house-elf according to the Ministry, which wasn't true.
Before that, it had belonged to the founder of a house full of people who'd spent about a thousand years being told they were the leftovers.
"I think it should go to Hufflepuff," I said. "The house, I mean. Not a museum."
Dumbledore ran his thumb over the badger.
"Yes," he said. "I think it should. Then I shall need to find a way of returning it without anybody asking where it has been." He folded the cloth back over it. "Leave that with me."
The Great Hall was hung in black and yellow for the leaving feast.
That was odd, because the House Cup had gone to Gryffindor, which McGonagall had announced at breakfast with a small, satisfied smile.
But there were no red and gold banners behind the staff table. There were black and yellow ones, and a huge badger stretched across the wall where the Gryffindor lion should have been.
Ron stopped dead in the doorway. "Have they made a mistake?"
"I don't think so," said Hermione, and went to sit down.
The Hufflepuffs had noticed too. They kept looking up at the banners and then at each other, as if they were waiting for someone to come and tell them it was a joke.
Near the end of their table, Cedric leaned over to Ernie Macmillan and asked, loud enough for us to hear, "Did we win something?"
Dumbledore stood up once the plates were empty.
"Another year gone," he said. "And what a year it has been."
He talked about the tournament, and how much the three schools had learned from each other.
He thanked Professor Moody for agreeing to teach the last weeks of term, and the real Moody grunted and checked under his plate. He thanked the champions by name, one at a time, and the whole Hall clapped for each of them.
Fleur raised her glass. Krum nodded once, which from Krum was practically a speech.
"And before you all go to bed," Dumbledore said, "there is one more thing."
He lifted his wand.
On the staff table in front of him, a small golden cup appeared, with two handles and a badger worked into the side. The candles caught it, and it glowed.
"Some time ago," said Dumbledore, "an object was lost that had belonged to one of this school's four founders. It has been away for a very long time. It was recently returned to me by people who would prefer not to be thanked, and so I will not embarrass them by trying."
His eyes passed over the Gryffindor table without stopping. "This is the cup of Helga Hufflepuff. From tonight, it will be kept in the Hufflepuff common room, where it belongs."
For a second, nobody at the Hufflepuff table moved.
Then Hannah Abbott screamed, and the whole table was on its feet. Ernie Macmillan was standing on the bench.
Someone threw a hat in the air, and then everyone was throwing hats. At the staff table, Professor Sprout had both hands pressed over her mouth, and her eyes were wet.
Two sixth-years had hoisted Cedric up onto their shoulders. He was laughing and trying to get down, and they wouldn't let him.
All in all, being a Hufflepuff looked like a lot of fun at the moment.
And people used to retake the Pottermore quiz to get out of it.
Under the table, Hermione found my hand and squeezed it. On top of the table, she went on folding her napkin into smaller and smaller squares, as though nothing had happened at all.
The Beauxbatons carriage left first, the next morning, from the front of the castle.
Fleur came to find me before she got into it. Gabrielle had gone home with their parents after the task, but she'd left something with Fleur, and Fleur held it out to me.
"Gabrielle left this for you," she said. "She made me promise not to look at it, so of course I looked. And you are not allowed to fold it. She was very serious about that."
It was a crayon drawing of me holding the cup up over a lot of green hedges. In one corner, Fleur was sitting on a bench with a bandage round her ankle the size of a pillow.
"She has made my ankle enormous," said Fleur. "I told her it was not so bad, and she said she was drawing how much it hurt."
"I'll find somewhere good for it," I said.
"Write and tell her that. She will check the post every morning until you do." She kissed me on both cheeks, and then she turned to Hermione and did the same.
"And this summer, when you are both bored, you will come to France, and I will show you a library that is better than yours."
"I'd love to come," said Hermione. "But ours is very good."
"Then come and see it," said Fleur. "And if you still think yours is better, I will buy you lunch."
She got into the carriage. The giant horses spread their wings, and the whole powder-blue house of a thing rose up over the lake and away. Hermione watched it until it was gone.
We had a compartment to ourselves on the train, for about ten minutes.
Then Ron came in to tell us that his mum had written, and that I was expected at the Burrow for at least a week in August, whether Sirius liked it or not.
After him came Fred and George, with the money bag tied round Fred's wrist with three separate knots, to tell me the shop was going to be called Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes and that I was getting the first thing they ever made.
Neville came last. He was holding a small clay pot with a Fanged Geranium in it, one of the ones we'd repotted together in Herbology, and he held it out to me.
"For the summer," he said. "It's only a little one. It doesn't bite much."
"Thanks, Neville."
"Oh, and it likes it colder than you'd think," he said. "A windowsill's good, as long as it's not a sunny one. And don't put your fingers near it when it's hungry." He gave the pot one last worried look and went back down the corridor.
It bit me just outside London.
Somebody had come to meet me this time.
In the books, Harry went out through the barrier every summer and got handed back to the Dursleys on the other side, like a parcel nobody had ordered.
Sirius was leaning against a pillar with his hands in his pockets, and apart from a couple of witches who looked twice, nobody paid him much attention.
Back in May, the Prophet had spent a week calling him a wronged hero. Two months later, the wizarding world had moved on to something else.
"I thought you might come as Padfoot," I said when I reached him.
"Tempting. Then I remembered I'm allowed to walk about on two legs now." He grinned and pulled a battered Muggle hat and a pair of dark glasses out of his pocket.
"This side of the barrier, I'm boring these days. The Muggles all saw my face on the news, though, and nobody's ever bothered telling them I didn't do it."
He put the hat on, then the glasses. "How do I look? I asked Kreacher this morning, and all he'd say was that Master Sirius looks like a Muggle, and then he went off to polish something."
Hermione's parents were waiting a little further along the barrier, and they were both looking at Sirius with the slightly fixed smiles of people who'd seen his face on television two summers ago and weren't sure how much of what Hermione had told them to believe.
Mrs Granger had the same hair as Hermione, tied back tight. Mr Granger had her way of looking at something like he was about to write it down.
"Mum. Dad." Hermione had hold of her own sleeve. "This is Harry."
Mr Granger shook my hand. He and Mrs Granger were both dentists, and halfway through the handshake I realised I had no idea when I'd last seen one. The Dursleys had never been keen on paying for that sort of thing.
"Hermione mentions you in every letter," he said. "Usually in the first paragraph."
"She talks about you two all the time," I said.
"Does she?" said Mrs Granger. "She never tells us anything about herself. We get three pages on house-elves."
"That was one letter," said Hermione, to the floor. "And it was about something important."
Sirius stepped forward and introduced himself, and within about three minutes he had invited both of them to visit Grimmauld Place in August and asked Mr Granger a long and serious question about whether dentists could fix the teeth of a hippogriff.
While they were talking, Hermione pulled me a few steps away, behind a trolley piled with somebody's trunks.
"Make sure you write to me," she said.
"I've got a mirror."
"Write anyway. I like having letters. I keep them all in a box under my bed." She was holding on to my hand with both of hers. "And be careful with the wards. If you're going to do anything enormous, tell me while you're still thinking about it, and not afterwards, when it's already done, and you're telling me how well it went."
"I will," I said. "I'll tell you everything first. I promised, didn't I?"
Then she put her arms round my neck and kissed me, right there on the platform, with her parents ten feet away and Sirius talking very loudly about hippogriff dentistry.
"August," she said, when she let go.
I nodded, and she went back to her parents. Mrs Granger put an arm round her shoulders. Mr Granger was still looking at me, but he was nearly smiling now.
Sirius came over and picked up one end of my trunk.
"Right," he said. "Home."
I'd never been able to remember where I lived before I woke up in this body. I picked up the other end of the trunk, and found I didn't mind that nearly as much as I used to.
Then we walked out through the barrier together, into the noise of King's Cross.
***
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